Dalian Polytechnic University recently announced it would expel a student for what it termed her “improper contact with a foreigner” that “undermined the national dignity” of China. The incident occurred after a Ukrainian e-sports celebrity posted, and later deleted, intimate videos with the student. In the intense online reaction that ensued, Chinese netizens criticized a host of problems with how the incident was handled, including the university and media outlets’ violation of student privacy, punishment based on outdated and paternalistic moral standards, misogynistic victim-shaming, and double standards in judging men and women’s sexual lives. Vivian Wang at The New York Times described the background and backlash to the incident:
“If there is anyone who truly undermined national dignity in this case, it was not the woman whose privacy rights were violated,” Zhao Hong, a professor of law at Peking University in Beijing, wrote in an opinion column, “but the online spectators who frantically humiliated an ordinary woman under the banner of so-called justice, and the educational institution that used stale moral commandments.”
The university said the student’s conduct, in an incident it said took place on Dec. 16, had “caused a negative impact.” It gave no details, but said the student was being punished in accordance with a university regulation about “civic morality.”
That regulation reads: “Those who have improper contact with foreigners and damage the national dignity and the reputation of the school shall be given a demerit or above, depending on the circumstances.”
Chinese social media users quickly linked the announcement to videos shared on that date by a Ukrainian professional video gamer, Danylo Teslenko, who goes by the nickname Zeus. Mr. Teslenko, who had been visiting Shanghai for an e-sports tournament, had posted videos of himself with a Chinese woman to his Telegram channel, where he currently has about 43,000 subscribers. [Source]
The hashtag “disciplined student should not be publicly shamed” was among the top trending topics on Weibo and attracted over 57 million views. Many commenters criticized the university and numerous Chinese media outlets for including the student’s full name in their publications on the incident. The Tencent News-affiliated WeChat public account “News Brother” contrasted the public doxxing of the young woman with the anonymity granted to convicted rapists in recent years. The account noted that in 2020, a Zhejiang University student with the surname Nu, who was convicted of rape and given an 18-month suspended sentence, was expelled from his university only after widespread public outcry, yet in the media and school bulletins, his anonymity was protected and he was not hounded for “undermining national dignity.” Similarly delicate media treatment was given to Zhenhao Zou, a Chinese student in the U.K. whose anonymity Chinese media often preserved despite his conviction this year for drugging and sexually assaulting dozens of women, news of which was censored on WeChat. Another WeChat blogger named Luo Yansu noted that other male university students who sexually harassed women or photographed women without their consent were given lenient punishments that often did not rise to the level of expulsion.
Chinese nationalist commentators supporting the university’s decision fixated on the claim that Teslenko allegedly referred to the student as an “easy girl.” But Chinese WeChat blogger Xiaoxi Cicero rhetorically asked whether there would have been the same nationalist uproar and university expulsion if the shoe had been on the other foot—if a young Chinese man had hooked up with a visiting foreign woman. Media commentator Zhang Feng criticized the “sexual nationalism” underpinning the incident, claiming that some men who might see romance between Chinese men and foreign women as acceptable, even laudable, would not feel the same if the roles were reversed, because they perceive Chinese women as chattel belonging to men and to the state. Another blogger writing on the incident argued that those who espouse this brand of nationalism are often motivated by a perverse desire to control others. Writing for the Phoenix News-affiliated WeChat account “Fengsheng OPINION,” Zhang Feng elaborated on the link between nationalism and the impulse to victim-blame women:
Because the man involved was a foreigner, the outcome was different [than if he had been Chinese]. Online, many people interpreted the incident as a case of “foreign men thinking Chinese women are easy to get.” This made many Chinese men furious, but instead of blaming the foreigner, they blamed the victim.
[…] There’s an implicit equation here: foreign man sleeps with a Chinese woman and then insults her online = humiliation of the Chinese people. But instead of holding the man accountable, netizens attacked the woman. It’s classic victim-blaming: “You brought it on yourself.”
Underpinning the online outrage of some of these Chinese men is the belief that women somehow “belong” to them. They see it as a form of “infidelity” and take it as a personal betrayal. And when such “infidelity” involves a foreigner, that sense of betrayal veers into xenophobic resentment of foreign “invaders.” [Chinese]
In a now-deleted WeChat post, Li Yuchen summarized the twisted nationalist logic of how the university berated the Chinese student instead of the Ukrainian e-sports player:
A foreigner films someone, shares the video, and insults her—and he walks away without any consequences.
A Chinese student gets secretly filmed, doxxed, and cyberbullied—and she gets expelled.
That’s like having your house burgled and the cops, unable to catch the culprit, padlock your door and accuse you of ruining the neighborhood’s reputation because you were careless enough to get robbed. [Chinese]
In another WeChat article that was later deleted, blogger 三月云 (Sānyuè yún) lambasted some “tianli” (田力, a sarcastic internet term for men) for making unfounded claims that the Dalian Polytech student had “undermined national dignity” because of her contact with a foreigner. The blogger noted that, among other double standards, many Chinese men fawned over Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi and American influencer IShowSpeed during their respective visits to China. The post ended with a list of other offenses to the “national dignity”:
There are no rights without obligations, and no obligations without rights. Rights and obligations must be reciprocal. If women are to be held responsible for upholding the “dignity” of the entire nation, then first please classify the manufacturing of substandard sanitary pads as “profiteering at the expense of the nation”; treat companies and individuals who engage in workplace gender discrimination as “agents of international espionage”; regard violations of women’s rights as an affront to the Chinese nation and the Chinese people; punish those who covertly videotape or photograph women as severely as those who leak state secrets; and treat the mandated divorce cooling-off period as a national disgrace on a par with the [1901] Boxer Protocol. Given that women are excluded from receiving their due share when the pie is being divided, how dare those tianli indulge in fantasies of forcing women to shoulder an unfair share of the collective blame? [Chinese]
Dalian Polytechnic University’s regulations also received great scrutiny following the expulsion announcement. Chinese lawyers shared articles on WeChat arguing that the university had no right to expel the student and criticizing its “Stone Age” regulations that conflict with higher-level national laws safeguarding students’ basic rights. Other punishable violations of the university’s code of conduct, in the same section that mentions “improper contact with foreigners,” include watching pornography and having premarital sexual relations. One WeChat article stated, “If Marx could see Dalian Polytechnic University’s regulations, he would be rolling in his grave.” Another article, by journalist Song Zhibiao, suggested: “If anyone or anything deserves to be ostracized, shouldn’t it be Dalian Polytechnic University’s morally biased code of conduct? Or the university administrators who faithfully enforced that code and got a kick out of publicly shaming a student?”
The incident occurred in the context of the Chinese government’s continued promotion of traditional Chinese virtues regarding sexuality and nationalist suspicion of foreigners. Ongoing propaganda campaigns warning about the dangers of foreign espionage have affected all corners of society, and some feature hotlines for Chinese citizens to report suspected espionage and rewards of up to 500,000 RMB. During China’s first National Security Education Day in 2016, Beijing authorities papered the capital with propaganda posters warning women of “dangerous love” with foreigners who might be spies. Meanwhile, the government continues to censor feminist groups and limit the sexual freedom of women and LGBTQ people—for example, by making it harder to divorce or by fining and imprisoning women writers of online erotic fiction.
At the same time, platform censors and state media appeared to allow criticism of the university to circulate, at least initially, and certain state-media outlets even challenged how the incident was handled. On Sunday, a China Daily reporter wrote, “A pertinent question also arises: Shouldn’t Zeus, if found guilty, face legal consequences according to the Chinese law, considering his alleged actions of damaging relationships, violating privacy, making derogatory remarks about China, and inciting discrimination?”
With additional translations by Cindy Carter.
